If you use the drop-down list on the AceText Editor to change a clip’s kind to “text with emphasis” then you can add emphasis or highlighting to the clip’s text. The drop-down list to the right of the one with clip kinds changes to show a list of named colors. The first color is “plain text” which does not have any effect. To add emphasis, select the text you want to emphasize and then select one of the other named colors from “Emphasis” to “Fountain highlight 10” from the drop-down list. The color of the selected text changes immediately. You can repeat this as many times as you like to emphasize as many different parts of your clip in any of the available colors as you like.
For all other kinds of clips, the second drop-down list shows a list of syntax coloring schemes. The first item is "no syntax coloring". This means the clip does not have a syntax coloring scheme of its own. All the other items are the names of the syntax coloring schemes available to AceText. Selecting one immediately applies its colors to the clip's contents. The colors themselves do not become part of the clip. AceText only remembers which syntax coloring scheme you selected for the clip. If you share your AceText collection with others then they will need to have all the syntax coloring schemes that you've used in your collection to see the highlighting. You can download syntax coloring schemes shared by other AceText users. You can also download the scheme editor to edit any of the provided syntax coloring schemes or to create your own.
AceText may still highlight URLs and email addresses in clips without a syntax coloring scheme. That includes clips with emphasis. You can enable or disable this for all clips without syntax coloring in the Appearance Preferences.
When you add emphasis to a clip, you select named colors such as “Comment” or “Hint Message”. You don’t select actual colors like “green” or “yellow”. The syntax coloring schemes work the same way. They apply different named colors to different parts of the clip. The schemes do have a longer list of named colors to pick from than clips to which you apply your own emphasis.
The named colors are translated into actual colors by the color palette. The color palette that you select in the Appearance Preferences determines the actual colors for each named color when AceText displays your clip.
Though this may seem cumbersome or restrictive at first, it makes emphasis and syntax coloring much more flexible. If you share your collections with others, you won’t know if they will be using AceText’s light theme or dark theme. You may even switch between themes yourself depending on the time of day and how well lit your room is. A color that provides nice contrast and emphasis on a white background may be hard to see on a black background, or vice versa. Basing both the editor’s background color and the emphasis colors on the same palette ensures the colors always provide the desired amount of contrast. AceText comes with a choice of color palettes that provide more or less contrast.
While you might think that green and red would clearly convey the intended meaning (good and bad) of the emphasis you added to a clip, your color-blind colleague may have a hard time seeing any difference. AceText includes several color palettes for the most common types of color-blindness. They allow color-blind people to get the full benefits from syntax coloring with the reduced set of colors they can distinguish. AceText even comes with monochrome palettes that use brightness and various underlining styles for emphasis instead of colors for those who think that modern editors use too many colors.
Even colors with obvious names like “underline” or “strong” aren’t hardwired to make the text underlined or bold. Some people think underlining is bad style. Someone else may prefer a monospaced font that is wider when it’s bold, meaning its not perfectly monospaced when mixing plain and bold text. They may prefer to customize their palette to make sure none of the text is made bold.
When you print a collection you can choose a palette for printing in the print preview. You’ll probably want to choose one with a pure white background to avoid wasting ink. AceText includes several printing palettes for this purpose. When you export a collection to HTML you can choose a color palette in the export dialog. You can pick a palette that matches the colors of the rest of your website if you plan to publish the HTML file.
When you send a clip with emphasis or syntax coloring to another application AceText can copy the clip in HTML or in RTF format to the clipboard. You can enable this for each application in the Applications Preferences. You can also select a color palette that should be used to generate the HTML or RTF separately for each application. You could select a printing palette when sending clips to a word processor in which you prepare documents that will be printed. You could select a dark palette when sending clips to a web editor in which you edit a website with a dark theme.
In all of these places where you can select a palette you’ll have a button that opens the Customize Editor Palette dialog. This dialog lets you pick one of AceText’s many predefined palettes. It also lets you use any of those as the basis for a custom palette. All the colors and font styles used by AceText’s editor control can be fully customized.